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Cellar Door

Words like mother and love often appear on lists of beautiful English words. But so do defenestration and lollygag. Obviously, they are not all chosen for the same reason. Some words tug at the heart, some pique the mind and others are simply euphonious. Perhaps the strangest member of the last category, the purely harmonious, is the otherwise ordinary phrase cellar door.

The claim that cellar door is beautiful to the ear — in opposition to its prosaic meaning — has been made by and attributed to a wide variety of writers over the years. “Poetry, in fact, is two quite distinct things,” H. L. Mencken wrote in a 1920 magazine column. “It may be either or both. One is a series of words that are intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm, as the single word cellar-door is musical. The other is a series of ideas, false in themselves, that offer a means of emotional and imaginative escape from the harsh realities of everyday.”

More recently, the superior sound of cellar door was mentioned in the 2001 movie “Donnie Darko,” in which a cellar serves as a time-twisting portal. In one scene, the main character, Donnie, sees the phrase on a schoolroom chalkboard. He asks his teacher why it’s on the board, and she explains that the words are thought to be especially lovely, vaguely attributing the idea to a “famous linguist.”

The fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien, who was also a philologist, might well be the linguist she had in mind. He mentioned the idea of cellar door’s special beauty in a speech in 1955 and is often given credit for it. Other supposed authors abound; the story is tangled. But Tolkien, at least, can be ruled out as the originator. He was, after all, just 11 years old in 1903 when a curious novel called “Gee-Boy” — which also alludes to the aesthetic properties of cellar door — was published by the Shakespeare scholar Cyrus Lauron Hooper. Hooper’s narrator writes of the title character: “He even grew to like sounds unassociated with their meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American.”

There is no reason to conclude that Hooper was the founder of the cellar door fan club, either, but it is notable that he used a template according to which the story often has been told since: a person of note — brainy, foreign or both — declares the sounds of cellar door to be exceptional, to the surprise of native but less discerning English speakers.

Often, commentators claim cellar door is beautiful without reference to any other source or author. Did they rediscover it? Or did they simply not remember where they first heard it? The writer and famous wit Dorothy Parker didn’t think much of the collection of beautiful words compiled in 1932 by the dictionary-maker Wilfred J. Funk, who topped his list with words like dawn, hush and lullaby. Parker said she preferred check and enclosed — but also cellar door. A journalist named Hendrik Willem van Loon was one of two other people who suggested cellar door as an omission in Funk’s list. Van Loon expressed surprise that Parker selected the same term: “I’ve only met Miss Parker twice in my life, and we’ve never talked of cellar-doors.”

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There is no scientific proof that the phonemes of cellar door are particularly pleasing to the English-speaker’s ear. A subjective poetic argument for the phono-acoustic superiority of the phrase is easier to make, as long as one can, as in “Gee-Boy,” dissociate sound from meaning. David Allan Robertson, a professor at the University of Chicago, touched on the basic delight of the phrase when he wrote in 1921: “Cellar door, oleomargarine; oleomargarine, cellar door. If we agree with modern fanatics, that assonance and cadence alone make poetry, we have a poem in those four words.”

In a similar vein, the drama critic George Jean Nathan used cellar door to mock Gertrude Stein in 1935: “Sell a cellar, door a cellar, sell a cellar cellar-door, door adore, adore a door, selling cellar, door a cellar, cellar cellar-door. There is damned little meaning and less sense in such a sentence, but there is, unless my tonal balance is askew, twice more rhythm and twice more lovely sound in it than in anything, equally idiotic, that Miss Gertrude ever confected.”

Sometimes, the loveliness of cellar door is thought to be more evident when the phrase is given a different spelling. “I was astonished when someone first showed that by writing cellar door as Selladore,” C. S. Lewis wrote in 1963, “one produces an enchanting proper name.” Norman Mailer toyed with a respelling in his 1967 novel, “Why Are We in Vietnam?” “He is marooned, in case you have not noticed, on that balmy tropical isle pronounced Selador, spelled cellardoor, ” Mailer writes of D. J., his 18-year-old protagonist. “Do you know a committee of Language Hump-type professors put out a committee finding back in 1936 — most beautiful word in the English language is cellardoor.”

Despite more than a century of elusive commentary on this topic, the only door we can identify with certainty is the open one through which those trying to investigate the matter have haplessly fallen. If you rely also on meaning, maybe closed cellar door is the more beautiful choice.

Grant Barrett is the editorial director of the online dictionary Wordnik and a host of the radio program "A Way With Words."

A version of this article appears in print on February 14, 2010, on Page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Cellar Door. Today's Paper|Subscribe